Nicole Sullivan and the Exceptional Performance Team at Yahoo used the popular YSlow Firefox/Firebug extension to grade the site performance of the 2008 presidential candidates.

How did they do? Overall, atrociously, all the candidates failed the YSlow exam except Mike Gravel who earned a "D". Page weight was a problem for Barack Obama, whose site weighed in at almost 700Kb. It was even worse for Mitt Romney, whose site weighed a whopping 1,531Kb. I hope he doesn't have supporters trying to make contributions on dialup modems!
Democrats got better grades in almost all performance subjects tested, in particular response times and page weight. They improved user experience for returning visitors by setting an Expires headers and improving the full cache user experience. This helped propel them to a performance GPA of "C" despite their failing YSlow grade. Republicans never managed to overcome the deficit and finished the semester with an "F".

I doubt that site performance will be a factor in the voting, but it'd be quite amusing if there turned out to be a relationship between the performance numbers and votes cast for each of them.

See Also:

Posted by jzawodn at February 05, 2008 06:49 AM

Reader Comments
# Rasmus said:

We should graph the number of XSS holes in each too. But I guess that wouldn't be very nice. ;)

on February 5, 2008 07:43 AM
# Weston Houghton said:


Is it me, or does YSlow almost rarely get things right? I don't think I've ever seen it recognize Akamai CDN calls correctly.

on February 5, 2008 08:37 AM
# chad said:

Weston: RTFM.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/faq.html#faq_cdn (as linked to in the YSlow output)
"Rule 2 says to use a content delivery network (CDN). The score for this rule is computed by checking the hostname of each component against the list of known CDNs. Unfortunately, the list of "known CDNs" are the ones used by Yahoo!. Most likely these are not relevant to your web site, except for potentially yui.yahooapis.com. If you want an accurate score for your web site, you can add your CDN hostnames to YSlow using Firefox's preferences. Here are the steps to follow:..."

on February 5, 2008 01:45 PM
# Gheorghe Man said:

Hello Jeremy,

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Sorry I am contacting you in this fashion. I wasn't able to find any contact information for you in a reasonable amount of time.

Thanks,
GMan

on February 7, 2008 05:30 PM
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